Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)
Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader. “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush, loudly beating—in each of these image-rich poems.
Pritts engages with other poets in Sentimental Spectacular, including Frost in his poem “Frost at Midmorning”: “…me, a proud honorary / astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained / & immortal beauty but, O, just a chump in love / with the ground…Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, / Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws…” Here, we find a wisp of a reference to Frost’s “Out, Out–”, an arguably unsentimental tale of a young boy’s lost hand, as well as ever-sentimental Whitman, with his exultant and emotional O’s and preoccupations with lovelorn “chumps.”
In the final poem “Inarticulate Bird in Befuddled Blooming Bafflement,” Pritts upends his moment-driven sentimental explorations, challenging memory and nostalgia as stable vehicles of sentimentality. “You can’t bring [this poem],” states the speaker, “to the waterfall you made up, // you can’t show it to the rainbow you see when you / close your eyes.” Where imagination and desire intersect with memory, Pritts shows, sentiment becomes longing, and Sentimental Spectacular veers in an unexpected direction, as startling as it is beautiful. “Some handy flower to dip into,” the speaker calls this shadowy memory, this longing for a past self that did or didn’t exist, “a struggle to remember the sweetness.”
–Rachel Mennies
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selvage: for country, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Belladonna, 2011)
The title of this chapbook from the Belladonna Chaplet series sets a complex backdrop for the poems within. The word selvage refers to the edge of a woven fabric that keeps the fabric from unraveling. The word selvage also calls to mind the word salvage. A selvage salvages the unity or wholeness of the fabric; it preserves the individuality of something, keeps it from blending in with the rest of the world and becoming invisible in the chaos.
In these poems, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s speaker seems to be struggling to preserve identity, control and hope. For instance, in the first poem, the speaker proposes that “Perhaps it is no longer necessary to hope” and asks, “Does it matter how I feel?” The first poem establishes a general sense of giving oneself over to the powers that be. And all that is left is hope as can be seen at the end of the second poem: “And if I think with all my heart / and if I listen with rituals and codes in place, / maybe it will come to pass.” There exists, within these lines, the possibility for sarcasm, though. The phrase “with all my heart” is clichéd and obvious, suggesting a speaker that is, in fact, no longer hopeful. A sarcastic moment here would indicate that hope does not have the power to revise.
Hope plays a substantial part in these fifteen pages of poetry. A poem on page 13 ends, “everything balances on hope.” Although hope becomes central to these poems, there are multiple forces working against it. The concept of free will also shows up often in Dhompa’s collection, but almost always, it is rejected: “As though / the plants on my kitchen window have free will” and “No point bringing up free will.” Dhompa’s poems expound the internal human struggle to understand and control one’s life.
Some of the poems, however, become too abstracted and limit the reader’s ability to connect with the speaker. Take the following lines for example, “Not error but irony / of displacement gives tyranny / degrees of exception.” The piggybacked prepositional phrases and abstract nouns—“of displacement” and “of exception”—push the reader farther from the poem’s core. But nonetheless, readers are left with a beautifully confusing and hopeful moment: “I leave / today and will / see you yesterday.” Yes, see you then.
–Melinda Kaye Wilson
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i wanted to be a pirate, Christine Herzer (H_NGM_N, 2010)
By design, Christine Herzer’s chapbook i wanted to be a pirate is an uneven and unpolished read. A visual artist, Herzer has scattered text, handwriting, scribbles, and blacked-out lines highlighting text in white. The poems are more successful in their telling rather showing, but Herzer mitigates that success by trying to maintain a distance from her poems and characters. She has several recurring characters, (‘surfer boy,’ Pan Tau, family members, and more), but none of them move beyond stereotype. There is very little personal connection here either between the reader and the poems or the speaker and the poems. Herzer writes, “I remember sister getting lost.” There is no article or possessive pronoun affixed to ‘sister,’ creating a colloquial, dramatic dissociation, which is soon contradicted. Other character-relation instances in the book feel similarly detached, emotional but partially insincere.
Though many whole poems don’t quite connect, there are many stand-out lines within them. The most simple and direct lines are the strongest: “the party, us arriving together / & leaving together, I liked it,” “where would i go if i had to be there / who would you call before the plane crashes.” Strong lines frame the poems but the attempted stories/emotions put to those lines are too expected. For example, the eponymous line, “we have so much love to do” is obscured in the poem, relying too heavily on butterfly sentiment (“it is a delicate process / branding wings, numbering wings”). While it’s unfair/unreasonable to expect narrative from poetry, “i wanted to be a pirate” is more notable for stand-out lines than its overall direction or impression.
–Matt Soucy
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Michael Vick has served his time and the moments will soon come when the National Football League has to decide whether or not it wants to reinstate a canine mafioso guru. Vick’s vicious dog fighting helix got him poster-man status for what to hate when it comes to the DeLillo-esque underworld croonings in and outside the United States. Sad that always happens to black man. Interesting that animal-fighting occurs all over the world and throughout history, so why would it not be happening in and around Georgia, USA? Turn on Discovery channel right now and you might see a lion mauling a helpless zebra. Freedom is only upright when there is an honest, unmitigated sanctuary for a creature to exist in.
A friend of mine used to go out with a bipolar guy, and she would get really frustrated at how much people would encourage the early stages of his manic episodes. She’d come home and find her friends covered with post-it notes, all of them chuckling about what a goof he was, making them all wear post-it notes. No matter how hard she tried, they could never quite get it through their heads that these events weren’t wacky fun, but warning signs—and of course, they all got to go retreat to their own spaces as his madcap fun escalated to full-on scary. Sandra Simonds pitches her work to that very narrow line between zany-fun and scary-crazy, always trying to push the language to the place just before it falls apart or attacks. She’s looking for that moment just before the poem stops being a good dinner guest and starts breaking the china. 
The rumor mills are churning! Why, last week at a party, I heard that All-American poet Matthew Dickman and his newly-minted arch-nemesis Michael Schiavo once were roommates at the…Breadloaf Conference—that the two were friends, or friendly, and that Schiavo made it his business to help less-than-impressive “Dickman 2” fit in with loads of discriminating loafers*. It’s a valuable and meaningful development, punctuated by an *outrageous* comment that “Dickman 1” has apparently made on Schiavo’s blog:
A Witch’s Dictionary is dense with its concept. It’s difficult to read, sometimes tortuous, other times rewarding. Sarah Kennedy infuses the book with alluring historical facts regarding witchcraft and witch trials. The witchery is juxtaposed with or compared to contemporary pre-election politics, particularly those of the Bush administration, giving this collection its necessary variegation. Witch hunts are bad; Kennedy builds bridges between witch hunts against women in Salem, witch hunts against Islam and witch hunts women in general.
When this book was first published, in 1968, Pablo Neruda was 64-years old and very famous. His Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion Desperado (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) had sold a million copies. He had received honorary doctoral degrees from Yale and Oxford and read his poems to a crowd of 100,000 at Pacaembú Stadium in Sao Paolo, Brazil. So the book’s central conceit – that the poet regretted how he’d spent his life, that he should have devoted his time to manual labor – must have been a hard sell. Neruda himself often seems unconvinced in these poems.
Susan Tichy’s third full-length collection, Bone Pagoda, is an elegiac travelogue. The title (which is also the title of the final poem in the collection) refers to an ossuary in Vietnam, constructed from the bones of 30,000 massacred Buddhist monks. Tichy’s emotional and metaphorical location is Vietnam—the poems weave through tropical scenes, mosquito nets and monks in saffron robes, and instantly flash to glimpses of burning flesh and severed limbs, all the while maintaining a self-conscious formal grip on the ineffability of it all. Tichy seeks to memorialize and speak what cannot be spoken: loss. There are many gaps, spaces and holes within the text and imagery. Her language is ever-conscious of its own failings, “In stuttering etcetera.” The book is intellectually stimulating, and Tichy creates many striking images for the mind’s eye; however, I never hit on an emotional center.
The Ice Ship & Other Vessels, Andrew Allport’s first chapbook, explores the ways in which we mask our perceptions of mortality, whether consciously or not. In the first poem, “An Unknown Shore: Variations on a Fragment by Oppen,” Allport repeats several lines with slight variances. By the middle of the poem, the lines “Cortez arrives. / he is absolutely lost / at an unknown shore, and he is enraptured” have transformed to “Cortez arrives too late. / the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost / to starvation and rapture.” The turn of events is chilling, and though the details of these events are not disclosed and the wordplay borders on tedious, Allport has successfully created an environment filled with decay and terminus. Our poet likes to linger in open parentheticals, and “Unknown Shore” ends as such: “(this is the nature of disaster.” The end of the poem strikes me as too much of a summation, but is interesting as it is consistent with Allport’s stratagem. As sodden as the chapbook may be in ends, it is the closure of this poem that is the most difficult to digest.
